India’s Financial Express has an interesting article on India’s efforts to breed better rice, including by using … gasp … biotechnology!
Orchards good for … ahem … wildlife
According to this article in The Independent, “Nature conservationists have called on the Government to protect Britain’s traditional orchards from further destruction, on the grounds that cultivated fruit trees provide a rich habitat for wildlife.” Good to see that their value in providing a rich habitat for traditional varieties of fruit trees is not going unnoticed!
Exploring edible biodiversity
I’ve lost track of the number of articles like this one I’ve seen over the years; a guide to the wealth of edible species out there in some part of the world, this time the Bong State recreation Area in Wisconsin, USA. Do they raise awareness of diversity in either agriculture or the diet? No idea, but they are fun to do, fun to write about, and in this case even fun to read.
Linking the agri to the cultural
FAO’s Globally Important Agriculture Heritage Systems (GIAHS) initiative is a potentially really cool way of linking agricultural and cultural heritage. They’ll be having a forum about it in Rome later this month. This will contribute to the development of projects in the following places:
- the Inca farming systems of the Peruvian Andes
- the oases of the Maghreb countries
- the integrated rice-fish system in China
- the Ifugao rice terraces systems in the Philippines
- Chiloé Island, one of the world centres of origin of potatoes
Frozen olives
A paper in the Journal of Biogeography reports on the biggest ever microsatellite study of wild and cultivated olives in the Mediterranean. There is a cline in diversity from east to west, suggesting that perhaps the wild olive in the west is feral rather than truly wild, but this study suggests that the wild olive spread out of 7 RPOPs, or reconstructed panmictic oleaster populations, in both eastern and western Mediterranean, possibly located in glacial refugia. Cultivated olives were domesticated in several RPOPs, and mediated geneflow in the wild species as they were spread around my humans. Has this business of glacial refugia been looked at for other cultivated trees in Europe?